Lost in Translation

Expounding on the difference between fiction writers and essayists, Harvey inadvertently highlights one of his problems: essayists, he concludes, are ""drawn to the mundane rather than the sensational."" In the 12 essays that make up this, his second collection after A Geometry of Lilies, Harvey wallows in the mundane. And while he and his wife may truly be ""great walkers,"" strolling ""to be with each other what we are with the world,"" and their children ""restless scoundrels that we made while cheating death on lonesome evenings,"" he tries so hard to wring depth and profundity out of everything he encounters that the results are often silly, annoying, or both. ""Harmonics are God's pitches"" he notes in an essay about playing guitar at his church. ""Writing essays is like realizing that you love your wife after all,"" he observes in another piece. A snowstorm becomes ""endless columns of white as all that rears skyward finds a way back to earth and is remade from the being of God into the image of God, the doily-hexagonal-star shape planted on a hickory stump like a generative kiss of death...."" The flip side of an obsession with minutiae is that minutiae can be interesting. Who knew, for instance, that the word ""gazebo"" began ""as a joke, formed in the 18th century by adding the Latin suffix, `ebo,' meaning `I shall' to the English word `gaze?' "" It seems fitting that Harvey should ponder gazebos: he's a skilled gazer. But his writing would be easier to digest if he'd expand his horizons. (July)